I recently discovered Beyond All Reason, a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. There have been several of these, but I think BAR is by far the best. It's open source, but looks nice and is polished. It has amazing quality-of-life features I haven't seen in any other RTS. And it supports insanely huge battles with hundreds of players and tens of thousands of units.
BAR has quietly become the best RTS to release in years and is a huge amount of fun. It really feels like the version of TA that my nostalgia remembers even though the game and units are a bit different.
My group don't play competitively, we hop on for a bot bash once a week and the AI is a lot of fun to play against. I'm excited for them to finally release on Steam because that will lower the barrier to entry and increase exposure because the game definitely deserves success.
Yeah, BAR is a technical marvel. I haven't been in a 150 player match, but I recently hopped in a 40 vs 40 match, and the engine just handles it, it feels the same, except there's 80 teams on the map. The game doesn't even have unit caps, practically speaking.
One of my favorite moments was in this 40 vs 40 match, and I pressed pause and typed "door" in chat. People started to complain, but nobody unpaused it. A few seconds later I said "j/k" and unpaused myself--but for a brief moment, I felt the joy of having _79_ people waiting on me to go answer the door. I guess I'm just a troll at heart, the absurdity of it is funny to me.
I also love the lack of sophistication in the game that would allow a single player to pause a 40 vs 40 game. Anyone can pause, and anyone can unpause, and yet somehow the community is respectful enough to make that work.
The lack of sophistication doesn't mean the game is broken and crashes, it just means there's technical oddities which I appreciate as a programmer and old school gamer. There's even opportunities to script the game, add new widgets, and share them with others. It's an open-source game after all.
Yeah, let me add that it’s a wonderful community. They won’t flame you for failing the frontline because your opponent has been playing the game since day 1.
If you just started, just stay in the backlines and do “eco”, people will be ok with that.
That's pretty good to hear. I've taken interest in it from time to time, and downloaded it at one point to spectate matches. It seemed really intimidating to my extremely casual RTS playing self with how much is happening.
There are some single-player missions and modes that you can play to try it out. And I heard there's going to be a commercial release with a full single-player campaign coming out eventually. https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...
Highly depends on the mood of the day tbh, but you will see this positivity from lot of players (the Academy on Discord is a great place to find these guys). You’ll also get flamed by others.
We have allsorts. If you can put up with the occasional misery there’s a lot of fun to be had.
It's very much a game of team coordination where the power curve is exponential but also can have huge turnarounds since buildings are fragile but drive the economy entirely
So naturally you have to know how to play your specific role or it can throw the game for everyone else
It's not casual like Command and Conquer or something, but nor is it incredibly sweaty like StarCraft or DOTA
I have a few friends who used to really get into C&C games, and factional balance is basically nonexistent (with the resident 'good guy' faction being the best), and usually the winning strategy is to just mass produce whatever bang for buck unit that faction has (basic tanks most likely).
This experience might uh, might not be universal. I found the 8v8 community unhappy when I accidentally threw games while trying to learn. I will say the 1v1 community is very relaxed though. Starting 1v1s or vs bots might lead to a better experience.
There are noob lobbies, the problem for me was that I just happened to be on the winning team a couple of times in a row, and suddenly my rank was too high for noob games, even though I still was one.
ya, this drips with the common noob complaint that people flame you for being a noob.
unfortunately that is a totally fair assessment. its a deep and detailed game with lots
of units, commands, mechanics and a few maps that have extremely developed meta.
this is only a problem if you think you can drop into multiplayer on literal day 1 without even doing any of the local/non ai learning options the game provides and expect your team to just deal with you not even knowing the basics.
And even then if you start in "noob" lobbies people are pretty helpful, to the extent that they are trying to play the game
and give you tips and can only do/type so much.
so its simple...
1. play the scenerios/vs to learn the basics. also watch some yt basics guides
2. join noob lobbies.
3. when people try to help you and they sound mad/terse/short it helps to assume they are just busy with their own match and are doing their best to play and help you learn. if they give you advice try to take it.
4. do your best and ping out when things are going bad in your lane.
the community on there really is very much "nicer" to noobs that many games, especially ones that are co-op team based. but you do need to have realistic expectations. people will get upset if you mess
up their games bc you havent at least tried to learn how to play at all.
"It's simple" followed by an on-boarding routine more complex than some paying jobs I've had.
You are way out on the edge of the bell curve. You only want to play with similar people. That's fine. But own up to it and don't pretend it's friendly to newbies.
Having experience of a distant past competitive multiplayer FPS game.
I started multiplayer mostly with a popular mod. I think the mod was popular for a multitude of reasons, one of them being classes and some classes were easier for the newbies to play (and also easier with bad internet connection, this game is old). You wouldn't need to master everything, some classes were more about just spamming explosives, some about aim, some about movement, some about prediction etc.
Then we got into the base game. It was quite sparse and not so fun as a team game at first. But it turned out, 1on1 was great fun if your opponent was about the same level as you (and with a proper map). Only then after that it started making more sense as a team game.
I think many games would benefit from some newbie-friendly format or mod or what you call it. In an FPS a mode where you are some class and already spawn with some decent weapon etc. So then you can concentrate on that.
In an RTS, don't know what it would be, maybe just have a lot less buildings, units and game mechanisms to choose from for newbies. Like a simplified mod with no air or sea units and no special buildings.
1. do the tutorial, maybe watch a guide
2. follow the dedicated onboarding track
3. give people around you the benefit of the doubt
4. point things out even if you don't know how to deal with them
Pretty reasonable advice for interacting with others in any capacity. If your jobs haven't provided stuff like this, maybe that reflects more on them.
Thats if you're sensitive to being flamed. I jumped in after playing against bots for 30s no previous TA experience and I was a complete terrorist for 5-10 games. Then I started just being a "bad" player and going unnoticed.
yeah they did exactly the opposite of the advice...
And id bet they put up
with it because "getting flamed" in bar is like 1000% less toxic than most online games and so i stand by 'friendly' on the relative scale of competitive online games today.
Sorry you got me wrong, i want new players to have a great experience and games with mixed levels of players can be more fun. Im not saying you have to have done xyz before you should be allowed to play online.
however, installing the game and jumping into multiplayer and selecting the first open lobby is just not a good experience for anyone.
It is still a game with a learning curve and tons ways to climb it. For as
steep as that curve is I might suggest that bar is one of the more newb friendly player bases.
Its like if you showed up in cod and literally didn't know how to move your character and somehow naded your team to cause them
to lose. Do you think those players would be like "good on ya try harder next time, maybe use the joystick if you wanna move around"... no way.. But i see something like the bar version of that in noob lobbies all the time.
Still, it's a competitive online game, people can get frustrated with you if you literally don't know how to play. You will
get frustrated with them trying to help you but not being especially nice about it. and it will be a bad experience.
It's a legit criticism that bar doesn't have a lot of guardrails to help you in the first days.
in that sense its absolutely not noob friendly, nobody says it is. If a game has to be candy crush level simple
to be "noob friendly" then bar is far to complex for that either, its just not that style
of game.
follow my (probably still a bar noob) advice or not, im
just trying to help you have a good experience in your first weeks in the game.
... and if suggesting that before you go into competitive play you literally just play the tutorial or vs ai is "complex" then bar is probably not the game for
you, but if you ever end up in a lobby with me id still try to help you anyway.
Heh. The thing with BAR is the game only exists because the developers like the game and have been building it for years. This means they regularly play the game.
And, you know, I'm a bit of a BAR developer myself. I added a UI widget that shows the number of active "Pinpointers", and now anyone can install it with one in-game click, if they want.
It's better in just about every way, and if you have a copy of TA (such as from GOG), you can load the soundtrack from TA into BAR's music folder and it'll change the soundtrack to the TA soundtrack.
They can't, they do not own the copyright to the engine code, and are bound by the terms of the open-source license. They cannot legally distribute the game as closed source.
What they are going to do is develop a single player "mod" that runs in the same engine, and they are using their money to help develop the game in the process.
Every time I played one of these SpringRTS games, the AIs would over-micro to dodge projectiles. Does this game have one of those properties? I'm sure there's people who are expert Starcraft etc. players who do enjoy that style of play but I didn't.
Yeah, I (noob) was able to win 3v3 with bots on both sides, but 1v1 with a bot was insane and from what I've seen people need some meta strategies specifically for that, so imo not viable for casual play. Bigger battles with bots also kind of feel all the same (and boring). I think you+friends vs bots would be fun
This is often recommended here, but I find BAR to have too much of an “arcade” feel compared to many other RTSes. It seems to be competing with modern Starcraft, not the rest of the TA lineage.
I’m sure many will like it, but if you’re expecting it to be like TA or FAF then you may be disappointed.
FAF in particular has a slower, more gradual pace, and is grander in scale, although this latter complaint may just be the smaller scale of the FAF units on the map. BAR also feels “cartoonish” somehow, the units have exaggerated animations (like Starcraft) and when they explode the physics feel off. Finally I just prefer FAF’s mechanic of a commander death ending the game for that player, it raises the stakes for protecting that unit and adds interesting strategic options.
BAR feels to me like someone took the various noob complaints about FAF (commander sniping, complex tech trees, slow pace) and applied them all to reduce the scope of the game.
People who compare BAR to FAF don’t seem to understand that. Your target audience isn’t former FAF players who like to coordinate epic multi-hour games, it’s players of fast-paced lobby RTSes.
> Your target audience isn’t former FAF players who like to coordinate epic multi-hour games
Multiplayer FAF games are fast, like 20 minutes, sometimes much more, but usually not too long.
Are you talking about FAF single player? Where you can noodle around for hours and the AI exists for the sole purpose of giving the player something to shoot at?
I mean the epics between top tier players. There are some streamers who cover these from time to time. (It doesn’t help that system lag and server issues can slow large games to a crawl.)
I was struck by something else about Beyond All Reason.
There's a popular Starcraft 2 commentary-and-gameplay streamer, Winter, who spent some time posting commentated BAR games. Videos from this period include direct pleas to his audience to take more of an interest because it's a better game with a better development model.
Then he took BAR off of his main youtube channel because that didn't work. He now seems to operate a separate variety channel with some BAR content.
I think about what this says about the role that marketing plays in people-in-general's choice of pastimes.
I think this says more about how the youtube algorithm works and how people want it to work.
I can't speak for everyone but at somepoint I find myself wanting to watch a sc2 game so I "turn on" wintersc's channel. Because I want starcraft. It doesn't really matter how good BAR is if I'm looking for sc2. I might want to watch BAR at some other moment, but that's a different behaviour mechanism, if you see what I mean.
Starcraft 2 is a 16 year old game that's a sequel to a 28 year old game. In my limited exposure that's a crowd of people who know what they like and want to stick to what they know, not a crowd of people looking for new things. Probably one of the most now-marketing-resistant groups you'll find. Marketing in 1998 may have been able to change it, though. ;)
> Starcraft 2 is a 16 year old game that's a sequel to a 28 year old game. In my limited exposure that's a crowd of people who know what they like and want to stick to what they know, not a crowd of people looking for new things.
So, in your opinion, Beyond All Reason is getting more new players than Starcraft 2 is?
I have a very strong opinion about everything not having the 2.5D viewing mode as TA cannot be a worthy successor for TA. The 2.5D mode was part of the fun.
Fair enough, but is there an advantage over the spring engine? Another clean room implementation that understands total annihilation data-structures, a project started 20 years ago.
For what its worth, the Total Annihilation derived project with the most attention currently is is BAR https://www.beyondallreason.info/ They decided to make it legally distinct, but it was the balanced annihilation project which was total annihilation rebalanced for better pvp. I don't play too many RTS so this is not authoritative, but BAR plays better than any other rts I have tried, They really care about the fine details of user experience there.
In fact, I consider Chris Taylor(Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander) to be one of if not the greatest RTS designers. His games don't have the fluff people appear to love(looking at you starcraft) but he gets the control design better than anyone else I have seen.
The Spring Engine also has a modern re-implementation of TA called Tech Annihilation[1]. This version seems more focused on a faithful reimplementation, which I think the general TA community abandoned long ago because the actual OG TA is not a very well balanced game.
I don't know if they've finally resolved it, but BARs biggest issue last time I looked at it (which has been a bit!) was that they (spring) implemented the game with deterministic, lockstep multiplayer (good!) but used native floats, compiler fastmath flags, and stdlib math functions throughout. So you'd desync instantly playing against anyone whose game was built with different compiler flags, or Windows x86 vs ARM OS X, or different versions of libc, etc, etc.
That said, BAR was great fun when I tried it and very well done. Even has a rapidly growing youtube community.
I play BAR a few hours every week. Online games are really good and smooth. BAR is by far the best RTS out there today. It only misses an awesome single player, but its coming now.
Some of the elements in BAR is really awesome, radar, anti-radar, radar killing rockets, EMP on anti-nuke. The strategic depth and complexity is really at DOTA level.
It's by far the greatest RTS to play for the next 10+ years. And its free.
"Implement a fix to desync issues across the different platforms, using VMs and simulated networking as a starting point for validation. Make no mistakes"
What's wrong with that? Yes you can less around with strictmath and fixed-point and all that stuff, and if you have cross-platform determinism needs then you kind of have to.
But it's much easier and makes the game faster to just not bother, compile the windows version and let people play under Proton/Crossover :)
The advantage presumably is that a player gets to experience Total Annihilation's gameplay as it was originally released, without any rebalancing. It's interesting historically as the root of its own lineage of RTS games, it's interesting from a nostalgia perspective, and it's a great, if dated, game in its own right; the campaign, music, and narration still hold up nearly thirty years later.
Gratuitous cutscenes, annoying barks everywhere, huge useless animated portraits. It is basically the blizzard polish, looks better than it plays. Not that Starcraft plays bad, but none of the fluff contributes to gameplay. And that gameplay takes a lot more micromanagement than it needs to(some people like this. me, not so much).
It's highly ironic that you've chosen to take this position about starcraft, one of the best playing games of all time.
Like, no, cutscenes have nothing do with improving gameplay, but they don't detract from it either.
The game itself is the epitome of responding to a user's inputs precisely the way they would expect them to.
There's certainly some design decisions you can dislike, (some of which were basically technical limitations) like some of the hot keys and workers not rallying, but those are pretty minor compared to the sheer perfection that is the rest of the game.
You can prefer a different type of game, one where you give high level orders to units or start with an army instead of building it, but that's clearly a very different genre of game and not one that TA and its children are trying to be.
> The game itself is the epitome of responding to a user's inputs precisely the way they would expect them to.
I have to admit my experience lies mostly in Brood War, and surely "the game responds intuitively to user inputs" is not one of the ways you'd describe it? That game is notoriously clunky in how it handles user input, both in terms of selection limitations, unit path finding, etc.
Don't get me wrong. I love Brood War. It's the only competitive video game scene I've really cared about. But I love it for its clunky user experience (which requires mechanical mastery in addition to a sound tactical mind), not because it's so smooth.
Could you say more on this? I've tried StarCraft a few times over the years, thanks to a lucky thrift store find as a teen. Got a Battle Chest for $10 and the key hadn't even been registered! Never got close to beating it, though. Been a while since last time, but my lingering impression says it was always a confusing sequence of disconnected events taking an agonizingly long time to play out, and the controls were hella clunky and fiddly. I kept trying anyway because something about it feels real appealing, but I don't quite get it. But I feel like I want to get it, y'know?
I'd love to say more but I'm not sure where to start.
Your experience of the game is going to change dramatically depending on when you first played it and how much experience you have with the genre in general. For all my gushing adoration for the game, it is well over a quarter-century old at this point and even then it assumed a fair amount of knowledge and understanding about how the genre works.
When you say "close to beating it" I assume you're talking about the single player campaign, as opposed to the multiplayer death matches?
It's impossible for me to separate my current opinion from the decades of memories I have bound up in the game, but I think the campaign still holds up today, especially in the remastered version. It tells an interesting story with missions that are still fun to play, assuming you enjoy the basic rts build base make units attack enemy.
Like I said, it's hard to tell exactly what part of it you're having problems with, the fundamental gameplay loop is start with a small base, build workers, gather more resources, build bigger base, use bigger base to build army, use army to secure more resource areas to build even bigger base, use biggerer base to build biggest army, win map.
If you're having trouble actually beating the campaigns, 90% of the time the problem is people aren't building enough workers, the exact math gets a little complicated but as a very general rule of thumb you should probably have 25-26 workers for every set of minerals you have a base at, and you should be prioritizing building these workers above basically everything else.
Once you reach something like 8 workers mining minerals you can afford to both constantly build workers and build other units, then once you hit 26 or so you can stop building workers and focus on maxing out your army. Generally speaking the campaign AI is pretty forgiving, concentrating on defense for the first 10 minutes and then pushing out with a maxed out army works on like 90% of the maps.
Beyond that, I don't know what to say about clunky and slow. If the game is too slow, you can actually change what speed it plays at in the options menu, it actually defaults to a medium speed that nobody actually plays the game at, everyone plays at fastest setting, so dunno, maybe that's it. Other than that, units do exactly what you tell them to, no more, no less, that's the nature of this type of game, you're expected to be controlling essentially every unit on the map at all times.
Queuing orders in TA and then in Supreme Commanders was best-in-class. Both single units and structures, and groups of them (selected with an assignable hotkey), could have infinitely long command queues. Patrol mode was useful for both engineers and normal units. SupCom added air- and sea-based transportation corridors. The queues were not broken if you ran out of resources temporarily; they just paused and then resumed when possible. I played TA before StarCraft and after Warcraft 2 - I felt SC to be a huge downgrade in terms of controls, and dropped it almost immediately. SupCom then came close to the absolute peak of RTS for me in terms of controls, physics, and economy management. The problem with all the fan-made successors is that I don't want PvP at all, and they seem to focus on that, while the original TA and SupCom were incredible single-player experiences, too.
Wow, thanks for replying! Thought I was pissing into the wind with that one.
I've never once touched the multiplayer mode. I don't recall seeing the option for it. I mean, I'm sure it's there, but I don't remember it, which means I've never clicked on it. So, yes, single player campaign only. A decent amount of the original, and then about half a level of Brood War when I skipped forward one time.
Wow, that sounds like a hella lotta workers. I vaguely recall trying that in a mission or two where I had severe resource problems, but then I didn't have enough offensive units and ran out of minerals by mining them too fast. Hmm... I remember getting frustration-curiosity a couple times and checking YouTube videos of how people beat missions I was completely stuck on, and being very unsatisfied because what I saw worked when I tried it myself but I didn't understand it (I can tell I didn't understand it because I don't remember it).
I didn't know there's a speed setting. That could make missions less of a long-ass slog, although, uh, controlling every unit at once? That sounds like a massive amount of busywork and I'm not confident I could pull it off (unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean). What I meant by "slow" is the missions can drag on for a reeeaaaally long time, and by "clunky and fiddly", I mean it was hard to make things happen because of all the... not sure how to describe it. I guess I'd want to change the speed lower, but then everything would take too long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And if by "the genre" you mean real-time strategy games, StarCraft is the only one I have any level of familiarity with, so if it assumes you already know that stuff, then that's probably a problem. When I said it's "a confusing sequence of disconnected events", I mean I couldn't correlate most of what I did to any of what happened. It was just random stuff happening most of the time, and when I changed my approach, I couldn't predict what the outcome would be and no significant learning occurred.
Despite all that, I really do like the game (wouldn't be talkin' about it so much if I didn't). I appreciate your advice, too. I'll have to see if I can get the thing running again.
There is a design choice to be made balancing apm and technical play and I think they went to far towards the apm side. Could compare it to bullet chess. While broodwars was arguably even more neurotic it oddly seemed to have more surprising builds. Like many, I've been wondering what slower speed sc2 tournaments would look like.
Also interesting, they went with a specific kind of maps with things like nearly identical mineral lines, no islands or isolated high/low ground, map symmetry, not to big, not to small, ramps, chokes etc and then they balance the game mechanics around those maps making those choices almost permanent.
I use to download a lot of replays and there is a lot more technical fun to be had that is pretty much irrelevant in apm battles. It is also funny to see the game fall apart on maps that don't follow the standard design. Like, flying buildings should be fun not useless or the end of the world.
Huh? I specifically said "my lingering impression". What I described is how the game felt to play, to me. I'm not talking about preferences and I'm not asserting some absolute universal state.
> Not that Starcraft plays bad, but none of the fluff contributes to gameplay. And that gameplay takes a lot more micromanagement than it needs to(some people like this. me, not so much)
It's an amusing complaint because there's nothing in the TA engine that would prevent players doing the same level of micromanagement as StarCraft, it just never developed that level of skill required to win games.
There's an element to that, but also, the more QoL you have and the smarter unit AI is, the less you have to do that. Yes, unit AI obviously won't ever play as good as you do but if you control a few units at key locations you'll outperform someone who's trying to control everything and do a mediocre job at it. You might say "how about they control every unit then" - works in games with a few units, way less so when you've got unit counts in the hundreds.
Starcraft is EXQUISITELY optimized for e-gaming and streaming. That means short games and relatively small maps and relatively small numbers of units and "snowballing". Small advantages from a micro battle or macro organization multiply quickly into an inexorable avalanche. It's why Blizzard has to CONSTANTLY jiggle things to bump the meta around.
Supreme Commander, by contrast, tended toward larger maps. Your Tier 1 unit rarely could find the opponent before they were already laying out Tier 2 buildings. Battles had ebb and flow and RECLAIMING after a battle occurred meant that if you survived a battle, you now had material to rebuild and possibly more than the person who launched the attack. The game was more homeostatic than avalanche. But that doesn't tend to make good e-gaming or streaming fodder for ADHD teenagers.
And the interface differences are MASSIVE. I could go on for HOURS about why I LOATHE the Starcraft interface and love the Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance one (and similarly Beyond All Reason). But, that's a personal preference thing.
None of that has anything to do with why starcraft is popular, though. Starcraft has a long history of organized professional competition, and that's responsible for sustaining interest in the game.
At first people played Starcraft for the campaign, internet access in late 90s wasn't common enough for a game to thrive on mostly online multiplayer. And it was popular back then. And playing on LAN was more of "20 mins no rush" thing.
A campaign is not enough to sustain a game's popularity for decades. Use Map Settings and the competitive scene did that. The latter of the two is still around and single-handedly explains the game's continuing popularity.
By the time my crowd had reliable enough connections for multiplayer, the number of people who knew and liked Starcraft from that campaign was much higher than the number who'd either gotten to love TA from the campaign or from vs-computer matches.
I beg to differ, I loved the TA campaign. Going from one lone commander with their side on the brink of defeat to orchestrating a final titanic clash of armies as you conquer the homeworld of your opposition was epic. SC never clicked with me in either gameplay or story.
It sort of does, they are not arranged in a campaign but there is a campaigns worth of single player scenarios included in BAR.
And this may be wrong, that is, I don't know how to confirm it, But I heard someone was working on a campaign, Which would be neat if true.
I quite like BAR but don't much enjoy PvP (I don't have the temperament or speed of thought for it, I like to pause and think too much). So I watch PvP games, and play AI skirmishes and scenarios.
I really like the vibe of TA campaign - there's no complex plot but it's quite tasteful: "What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machine, escalated into a war which has decimated a million worlds. ..." CORE is uploaded minds, ARM is cyborgs with human flesh in them. Epic fight, epic music...
People are working on BAR campaign, but it's like space war between different empires. I don't care for that kind of stuff, there's already too much content of this kind.
I have been working on this for supreme commander!
With modern tooling, libraries and such, many of supcoms old technical issues can be addressed. (plus it now works on linux and mac!)
I think I'm close to a like for like version.
And of course the performance is leaps and bounds beyond what supcom could do, you can see a 64,000 unit air fight, and I'm pretty sure i can get that going at 60fps plus!
and end game vs the ai, is still 4x realtime, well beyond what supcom could do.
This is supremely exciting, thank you for working on this. I also immediately thought of Iroh for networking (nit: though I do think you could include the port in the copy-pastable player id).
Using Lua files for AI does not seem like a great idea if you have control over the game source, though you can likely run run one lua thread per AI player.
I wonder how much your project is an attempt at a faithful reverse-engineered version vs an improved one, though given that you improved on networking, I would guess the latter? There are many features I would love to see added in, such as multi-monitor (multi-window & multi view) support. My concern is: as you diverge more and more by adding features, you risk making it harder to compare to the original for accuracy.
Anyway, as I failed to install FAF in my Flatpaked Steam install a few years ago [1], I would really appreciate a native Linux build for this (though I guess I could try the .exe under Steam/Proton).
I also played a bit of Supreme Commander on my Steam Deck, and while it was playable, I would appreciate better controller integration (at least Steam Input to simplify UI overlay creation).
All of that, and more, would be doable with a decompiled port.
[1] It would have been possible, I needed to shoehorn a java runtime in there, but it didn't sound fun anymore and only had a few hours to play with friends
Dude.....I need this. SupCom is one of my favorite games of all time (especially the "World" custom map, so many games played on that one). Super excited
sup com is legitimately incredible I can't believe 20 years later and nothing has managed to match it yet. planetary annihilation was cool and did some interesting things but never felt as good. sanctuary shattered sun looks like it might be pretty good but it's still early and progress has been slow hopefully that can deliver.
Random meta comment - but have you noticed that especially Codex generated websites tend to have these 01, 02, 03 numbers as part of card layouts? (see the section just below the header). It's almost the em-dash equivalent for AI built website detection.
I really despise these AI generated websites, they often look so samey. IDK about the numbering, but the overuse of cards everywhere, and abusing my favorite color schemes (tokyo-night, dracula style), really irritates me (esp, the color schemes, way to ruin even colors, guys).
It makes me dislike whatever they're trying to "sell" (literally or metaphorically). I wish people who wanted to be "creative" would you know... be creative, not just "push button, machine go brrr" which is what half this stuff spits out. Template, generic, no individuality. Hyper "professional" looking (but just "cool" enough to not be completely corporate).
On the other hand some of these look better and are more responsive than older sites that were definitely fuglier, klunky and less responsive. It feels like there's a middle ground, which I think is where good designer comes into play.
I don't think that's unique to AI --- many sites always had the same bland style, especially corporate ones, and I remember all the complaints about bootstrap.css when that was the trend many years ago.
Websites for what were ostensibly hobby projects didn't use to have a bland corporate look to them.
And it really gives me the ick when I see websites about things like game modding projects and they're full of AI linkedin-speak. I feel like if you were excited about building a mod for a game you wouldn't need AI to describe it for you, or write the announcements/reddit posts trying to reach out to the community.
I witness a large amount of AI generated pages at work and in the wild. Creative control belongs to the human because without it you get a scientifically accurate model without the stargazing factor.
I have built a few better sites after AI generates the shell. The colors and styling need about a dozen human interactions to get something passable as human created.
Unfortunately did not even come close to capturing the magic of the original or TASpring / BAR though, sadly. I wanted to like it but it suffered from a lot of sequelitis.
I did really like PA, and still play it more often than SC/SC2/TA, but the UI was completely broken under Linux for a while (after a few years, it started running with software rendering, now the community more or less fixed it). To their credit though, they did have a Linux build.
That game always felt more like supreme commander then TA to me... Personally I preferred the foss games spawned out of the spring engine like eg zero-k and the previously mentioned beyond all reason over it
It's true that the game director Jon Mavor, who wrote the graphics engine for TA, was also the lead programmer on SC. And he's not the only point of confluence between the two games.
Not sure about this one, but there is another engine that started as a Total Annihilation clone: https://recoilengine.org/
Some of the (open source) games on that engine (https://beyondallreason.info/ and https://zero-k.info/) have similar feeling with the original TA, with quite different play styles. I do prefer Zero-K over Beyond All Reason, but I would recommend anyone interested in the genre to try both and decide for themselves.
Zero K is deceptively amazing, like StarCraft mixed with supreme commander.
The lead Dev's "Cold takes" blog series are dripping with the sort of insights you only get from years of hard won iteration and if you like RTS games are a joy to read : https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes
The Supreme Commander community, the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, still has an active community here: https://faforever.com/
"Forged Alliance Forever" is also a great mod, balancing changes, game lobbies and whatnot.
Tried to use it and the error messages and documentation were overwhelmingly unhelpful. Spent about an hour on it.
Maybe it will get better though, good luck!
I have such good memories of TA. I was about 12 years old when it was released, and it was one of my first "computer games". It was my first introduction to RTS games, and in a lot of ways defined the genre of games I love today.
I spent so much time in the game playing the story, then playing skirmishes, building massive bases. "Hacking" the game to increase the max-unit-count to numbers my computer could barely manage.
Then I discovered HEAT.NET and started playing in a competitive clan. Then... life happened, and I have a lot of nostalgia for it now, but not enough time.
I noticed that. I'm kinda surprised they cant get it working these days on Apple Silicon. I was excited to try it on my Neo but they noted OpenGL and a dependency is the hangup. Somewhat surprised this isnt on Vulkan or something (I think there is a Vulkan - Metal translation layer available)
I love this so much. Something I’m a bit obsessed with lately is watching AIs (the classic kind) battling endlessly in games like this. Total Annihilation is a great fit for it because the maps are often wide open and grand scale.
I think Beyond all Reason has had some 50v50s or close that are a bit ridiculous to watch.
TA's ai was pretty dumb, actually... on most maps with unpassable water, they'll happily crank out kbots without building any ships or planes, until it hits the unit limit.
Yup. Being able to API like open broodwar creates a way to make the game an arena for AIs on a ladder. Then there’s some more interesting stuff that can go on.
I love the idea of having some reinforcement learning approach that keeps generating new AI versions that play each other indefinitely.
I can get past the AI slop design myself, but the writing style is absolutely grating, especially the short repetitive phrases.
"Punchy phrase. No X."
"An open engine. Room to make it your own.
"Same scene. Same instant. The same explosion. A different atmosphere."
"A few things to know. The short answers."
Why is it always the same? What awful post-training, or synthetic data training pipeline, or RLHF gone wrong, produced this homogenised, low variety slop style? And it's totally possible for LLMs to write actually decent or at least varied prose and I would think Anthropic (or OpenAI) has the resources to fix the issue, they just choose not to.
Marketing copy wasn't this homogenous prior to LLMs, unless my memory fails me.
It's like it's based on the sample copy of component examples from libraries like Tailwind and Bootstrap. It's as if it hasn't separated those demos from marketing copy people actually used.
What exactly looks bad about it? These models have been trained on high converting UX patterns. They are definitely homogenous but I am not sure they look bad.
I made a similar reply to another comment here but,
It really gives me the ick when I see websites about things like game modding projects, things that are for-fun creative projects, and they're full of AI linkedin-speak. I feel like if you were excited about building a mod for a game you wouldn't need AI to describe it for you, or write the announcements/reddit posts trying to reach out to the community.
Why... Maybe the website is the thing that's the least fun or the least important and that would be a good fit for delegating that work to an AI, isn't it?
Like when you were a kid goofing around with some art supplies and you tried to mix every color of crayons, markers, watercolors, and/or colored pencils together to be both anything and everything all at the same time: It's just a sea of homogeneous brown yuck.
That homogenized yuck might work for code that is ultimately interpreted by a machine and that performs some kind of human-described function, but in writing (and in menu boards) it's just highly-emphatic sludge.
My biggest complaint (as always) is that the performance is abysmal. I wasn't going to click on it, but after reading this comment went in and tried to play the demo.
A) I was hit by a multiple _second_ load time (on a 1Gbps pipe btw)
B) The in game cursor was _visibly_ lagging
C) The gameplay itself was stuttery (and I am almost certain there is a hard one frame delay between most actions)
Then I thought, alright it could be Firefox, so I loaded it up in a fresh chromium image, and somehow it's worse. Then finally I looked at the source and it's very obvious why the performance is atrocious (the guy didn't really bother to tell his agent, "hey man, let's benchmark this and keep performance in check, maybe don't spam a billion draw calls everywhere y'know, maybe
Values below are medians across runs, including the median of each run's
maximum tick time. Each pair reads *Go 1.25.0 → Go 1.27.1*; timings are ms.
| Mode | Process CPU/tick | Wall p50 | Wall p95 | Run maximum | Allocated bytes/tick |
With modern tooling, libraries and such, many of supcoms old technical issues can be address. (plus it now works on linux and mac!)
I think I'm close to a like for like version.
And of course the performance its leaps and bounds beyond what supcom could do, in the replies a few down, you can see a 64,000 unit air fight, and I'm pretty sure i can get that going at 60fps plus!
and end game vs the ai, is still 4x realtime, well beyond what supcom could do.
Definitely! Supcoms downfall was the poor threading support and IIRC the in-game AI path finding continuing for destroyed AI units which bogged the game down over time. At least one of them was never fixed properly.
SupCom FaF has a very long list of changes, I'd guess some of the people behind it already have access to source code. IMO only changes that are still missing is making it multi-threaded and maybe fixing some AI deficiencies such as pathing and the like.
The first would be great, but probably very difficult technically. The second would probably cause a holy war in the community, as multiplayer RTS enjoyers glorify fighting against the genre's jank as an expression of skill (admittedly it would completely change all micro).
PvE vs. AI on maps larger than 10x10 slows down to a crawl after ~40minutes. It's not FPS (which remains perfectly smooth), though: it's the simulation speed, influenced by pathfinding, trajectories of every single projectile, managing construction, managing units' scripted movement, and all the AI decision-making. Plus the performance penalty of using Lua (and its GC) for parts of game logic. Apparently, all of that is crammed into a single thread, and by the time you have 1k units, simulating 1 second of in-game time can take 3-4 seconds (or more, obviously, depending on the CPU; but single-core performance stopped improving drastically at some point). It's been a few years since I last checked, but I'd be surprised if anything beyond 20x20 maps would be playable against the AI, even today. And since it's a matter of codebase architecture, fixing it would require a rewrite (someone in this thread is actually attempting it, which could be fun).
I played some TA in my time and recently stumbled upon replays on youtube. There is some way to play the single-player experience online already though a bit shady on the copyright it seems.
The original game got a lot of things right, I saw videos of Beyond All Reason and while I didn't play it it didn't quite _feel_ like it would give the same feedback while playing.
I was considering doing exactly that in my spare time, so thank you nanolathe I'll definitely check it out.
At this point with the speed AI assisted decomps, remakes, reverse engineered ports, and homebrews come out I think GTA VI will be "released" (not by Rockstar ofc) on PC days after the PS 5 release. Especially that an early leaked dev build, compiled on PC, is already out there which helps a lot with the case.
I wonder how long it will take society to move past the idea of intellectual property being a thing you can own / control / solely exploit. It seems to me that in the future, the spoils will go to the most motivated. Which is already how it works, but money has been the dividing factor: I am thinking of the web game Pandemic 2, it came out as an ugly flash game but it was a lot of fun. Then, another guy (who was on the Shacknews forum at the time) saw it, and I guess he had some money, so he hired artists and engineers and copied the game, creating Plague Inc, a much slicker and polished version of Pandemic 2. We should all be familiar with Plague Inc, as that guy is certainly a multi-millionaire now. But all he did was put more effort into some other idea he liked. It seems to me that this Total Annihilation port, and projects like Beyond All Reason, show that in some cases, humans can appreciate the idea that intellectual property isn't really locked up if the owners aren't exploiting it themselves. We just need to move the needle a little further: if you aren't properly exploiting your intellectual property, and someone else who is more motivated can do it better, that's fair game. Isn't that how it already works in so many cases, anyway? We're all just trying to build better widgets than each other, often just the same widget in so many different variants.
> A patent has always told everybody exactly how to re-create your magic.
This is the theory, yes. Have you ever tried to actually do this? They are never written by engineers, and are much more focused on being as vague and broad as possible to be as useful a legal weapon as they can.
Patents are rarely even useful in reverse engineering, let alone enough on their own
Why the random swipes? This is a really interesting topic that doesn't deserve this kinda treatment. Reasonable people disagree on the concept of intellectual property (though most agree the west's current iteration has serious problems)
The best thing about TA years after it was released was the mod scene. Specifically around AI and unit mods. Because of that we kept playing it well until SupCom forged alliance was released.
I love the TA soundtrack. (Pity about Jeremy Soule being an alleged predator.) The old RTS games (Age of Empires, Starcraft, Red Alert) had such great soundtracks.
i never played ta, but "beyond all reason" is worth mentioning as it seems to be also a more
modern (relatively) take on ta. mostly similar units but a 3d
engine etc. Also open source and free to play wo any of the dark patterns that pervert most modern multiplayer online games. "battle passes" , "pay to win", gambling "crates"
This is amazing! Thank you for reminding me of the one game I spent so much time playing when I was young. I remember drawing the units on paper and playing with them on the table when I didn't have access to the computer.
TA is an amazing game. Forged Alliance is a better game because it was made 10 years later. The open source FAF project to mod it and keep it alive can only go so far without engine replacement. I’m hoping we can see something like this for Forged Alliance. BAR is a TA clone, missing out on the structural improvements from Forged Alliance
For me the 3.5 teirs of units in Supcom feels better then the TA style. The simple start with teir 1, the expantion of options with teir 2, sledge hammer of teir 3, ending with the experimentals. TA and clones felt like simple straight to end game.
Taking abandonware titles, and essentially doing a port/remaster that isn't byte for byte accurate but is far easier to mod I think is where the interesting work and value is here. The legal side is going to get messy though.
> The original isometric view gains a new sense of scale.
Come on ChatGPT/Claude, you're smart enough to know the original wasn't an isometric perspective. It was directly top-down, no camera rotation. 3D over 2D terrain with a heightmap.
Top down can be isometric. Isometric means “same measurements.”
It refers to how the viewport is not like a camera above 3D terrain. Instead, you see each point below as though directly above. In other words, you can only ever see the top of an object regardless of whether it is centered or on the edge.
If it wasn’t isometric, you would see more of the sides of objects that are near the edges.
I've always assumed that isometric as used in describing videogames refers to the isometric projection, which is a very specific angle - or at least games that look approximately isometric. Age Of Empires, SimCity 2000, Constructor etc. Some of them were actually Dimetric or something else, but I'd never have referred to, say, SimCity 1 as an isometric game.
Very cool! I found the different rendering to deviate too far from the original renderer, so for now I think the version on Steam is a better experience.
But this is promising! I look forward to updates!!
This is incredible and still one of the best RTS games available. However, the old rendering engine somehow looks more appealing a similar issue with Shogun 2.
People in the comments are misundertsanding the difference between a faithful remake and a "spritual successor" with completely different units, gameplay, and content.
Why does it have the name nanolathe attached? What is that about? You can’t just steal an entire commercial game and give it a new name and pretend it’s your own thing
There's a dead comment asking about the use of the term "clean room". I'm not sure why. I am not entirely certain that deeply analyzing super detailed traces qualifies as "clean room".
Heh. I did my own game engine rewrite project recently, and once it reached parity I started thinking "ok so how can I make it look better?". I also added bloom, and on some level it did look kinda cool but ultimately I decided it was tacky. No offense to OP but I think the graphical "enhancements" here are also pretty tacky (but I totally understand the urge to add them!)
Interesting. Looks like he has made a "clean room" clone of TA by pointing AI at it, getting it to reverse engineer it and write some docs, and then have another AI write an implementation based on those docs.
I would be surprised if that stood up in court but I doubt anyone cares for TA at this point anyway.
Yeah I'd be surprised. Law has a certain amount of common sense and if there's a new technique that just lets you easily clone any software they aren't going to say "aha good loophole you win".
Plus I think clean room process needs two separate teams and this is just one guy.
I did find this post from actual lawyers about it, but basically it's a grey area that hasn't been decided yet.
I was wondering what this "clean-room" jargon actually meant, after looking at the Adobe ripoffs being vibe coded by ArtCraft.
As with most forms of theft and laundering, it's not really that clever.
>> This document records behavior established from static analysis of the retail TotalA.exe. It is a clean-room behavioral contract, not a source translation. It deliberately omits executable addresses, data-image offsets, and raw decompiler names. The phrases established, supported inference, and unknown distinguish what the analysis proves from what remains a useful but unverified interpretation.
The evidence is the executable's own control and data flow, its PE import table, and its embedded string vocabulary. Nothing here is taken from another engine, a capture, or a reimplementation.
Step 1: Ask an LLM to decompile a binary, wash it into a "clean" description of the binary in its own format (a bunch of .MD files, one might suppose) and then build a new binary from that description.
IIRC, that's how Compaq cloned IBM's PC BIOS, with humans doing the analysis instead of an LLM, without leaving IBM any legal grounds to sue Compaq for the cloning. Being a clean room re-implementation is also why Linux was able to clone UNIX without getting sued out of existence by AT&T or SCO so we'd all jolly well better hope that it still provides legal protection.
If they had sent the machine code through a modem, out a speaker, into a microphone and back into a modem, that would've been illegal. So what you're talking about, really, is just a legal exemption that's been carved out for humans who do work from scratch themselves. There's nothing about cloning a BIOS with a team of people rebuilding it that is necessarily not IP theft, or legally sacred either. It's just that there's an even stronger case to be made that having an LLM do it is fundamentally not clean, because the LLM is itself just a massive decompiler / compiler. A bunch of humans performing the same action are somewhat exempt by custom.
Hooray. I’m glad we’re building all these data centers so that folks can pretend they accomplished something by making Claude vibeslop out another decompile
Typical "piracy with way too much effort". With modern ML tools, author could at least change all the graphics; but no, generic upscale.
I hope it gets booted off Microsoft-owned Github for blatant copyright infringement. Total Annihilation ain't abandonware, and Xbox division don't need legal boycotts from third party publishers.
Since none of the copyrighted expression is included in the package, you need the original assets, that’s not very likely. You can copyright ideas, just a specific expression.
You’d have to redefine copyright as “claim to a latent space region”, which the techbros would love since theyd effectively get to sell that new land.
Don't assume your readers know anything at all. Work out your assumptions and always state them.
I was curious, but not enough to do more than a cursory search. Apparently it's some game I've never heard of and am not curious enough about to read an entire article on it to learn what it can't run on and why porting it was worth it.
State your axioms. That means, step 1, work out what your axioms are, and specify them.
I am pretty sure their first axiom is "this is only interesting to people who know TA already" and, as you suggest, that's probably correct. There's no reason to annoy your primary audience in trying to make your hobby project accessible to people who are not interested in it.
150-player match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQJujiZ-oz0
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
My group don't play competitively, we hop on for a bot bash once a week and the AI is a lot of fun to play against. I'm excited for them to finally release on Steam because that will lower the barrier to entry and increase exposure because the game definitely deserves success.
One of my favorite moments was in this 40 vs 40 match, and I pressed pause and typed "door" in chat. People started to complain, but nobody unpaused it. A few seconds later I said "j/k" and unpaused myself--but for a brief moment, I felt the joy of having _79_ people waiting on me to go answer the door. I guess I'm just a troll at heart, the absurdity of it is funny to me.
I also love the lack of sophistication in the game that would allow a single player to pause a 40 vs 40 game. Anyone can pause, and anyone can unpause, and yet somehow the community is respectful enough to make that work.
The lack of sophistication doesn't mean the game is broken and crashes, it just means there's technical oddities which I appreciate as a programmer and old school gamer. There's even opportunities to script the game, add new widgets, and share them with others. It's an open-source game after all.
If you just started, just stay in the backlines and do “eco”, people will be ok with that.
Maybe I'll give it another look.
We have allsorts. If you can put up with the occasional misery there’s a lot of fun to be had.
It's very much a game of team coordination where the power curve is exponential but also can have huge turnarounds since buildings are fragile but drive the economy entirely
So naturally you have to know how to play your specific role or it can throw the game for everyone else
It's not casual like Command and Conquer or something, but nor is it incredibly sweaty like StarCraft or DOTA
I feel like whether a game is considered sweaty or casual is more dependent on the game mode (e.g. ranked vs normal, UMS vs ladder etc).
I have a few friends who used to really get into C&C games, and factional balance is basically nonexistent (with the resident 'good guy' faction being the best), and usually the winning strategy is to just mass produce whatever bang for buck unit that faction has (basic tanks most likely).
unfortunately that is a totally fair assessment. its a deep and detailed game with lots of units, commands, mechanics and a few maps that have extremely developed meta.
this is only a problem if you think you can drop into multiplayer on literal day 1 without even doing any of the local/non ai learning options the game provides and expect your team to just deal with you not even knowing the basics.
And even then if you start in "noob" lobbies people are pretty helpful, to the extent that they are trying to play the game and give you tips and can only do/type so much.
so its simple... 1. play the scenerios/vs to learn the basics. also watch some yt basics guides 2. join noob lobbies. 3. when people try to help you and they sound mad/terse/short it helps to assume they are just busy with their own match and are doing their best to play and help you learn. if they give you advice try to take it. 4. do your best and ping out when things are going bad in your lane.
the community on there really is very much "nicer" to noobs that many games, especially ones that are co-op team based. but you do need to have realistic expectations. people will get upset if you mess up their games bc you havent at least tried to learn how to play at all.
You are way out on the edge of the bell curve. You only want to play with similar people. That's fine. But own up to it and don't pretend it's friendly to newbies.
I started multiplayer mostly with a popular mod. I think the mod was popular for a multitude of reasons, one of them being classes and some classes were easier for the newbies to play (and also easier with bad internet connection, this game is old). You wouldn't need to master everything, some classes were more about just spamming explosives, some about aim, some about movement, some about prediction etc.
Then we got into the base game. It was quite sparse and not so fun as a team game at first. But it turned out, 1on1 was great fun if your opponent was about the same level as you (and with a proper map). Only then after that it started making more sense as a team game.
I think many games would benefit from some newbie-friendly format or mod or what you call it. In an FPS a mode where you are some class and already spawn with some decent weapon etc. So then you can concentrate on that.
In an RTS, don't know what it would be, maybe just have a lot less buildings, units and game mechanisms to choose from for newbies. Like a simplified mod with no air or sea units and no special buildings.
That's fine! But. Again. Own it instead of pretending it's something it's not
And id bet they put up with it because "getting flamed" in bar is like 1000% less toxic than most online games and so i stand by 'friendly' on the relative scale of competitive online games today.
however, installing the game and jumping into multiplayer and selecting the first open lobby is just not a good experience for anyone.
It is still a game with a learning curve and tons ways to climb it. For as steep as that curve is I might suggest that bar is one of the more newb friendly player bases.
Its like if you showed up in cod and literally didn't know how to move your character and somehow naded your team to cause them to lose. Do you think those players would be like "good on ya try harder next time, maybe use the joystick if you wanna move around"... no way.. But i see something like the bar version of that in noob lobbies all the time.
Still, it's a competitive online game, people can get frustrated with you if you literally don't know how to play. You will get frustrated with them trying to help you but not being especially nice about it. and it will be a bad experience.
It's a legit criticism that bar doesn't have a lot of guardrails to help you in the first days. in that sense its absolutely not noob friendly, nobody says it is. If a game has to be candy crush level simple to be "noob friendly" then bar is far to complex for that either, its just not that style of game.
follow my (probably still a bar noob) advice or not, im just trying to help you have a good experience in your first weeks in the game.
... and if suggesting that before you go into competitive play you literally just play the tutorial or vs ai is "complex" then bar is probably not the game for you, but if you ever end up in a lobby with me id still try to help you anyway.
And, you know, I'm a bit of a BAR developer myself. I added a UI widget that shows the number of active "Pinpointers", and now anyone can install it with one in-game click, if they want.
I worry that they may be looking to take it closed source
What they are going to do is develop a single player "mod" that runs in the same engine, and they are using their money to help develop the game in the process.
I’m sure many will like it, but if you’re expecting it to be like TA or FAF then you may be disappointed.
You might be missing an important detail: every shot counts. In early game, at least.
Late game is kinda janky tbh
BAR feels to me like someone took the various noob complaints about FAF (commander sniping, complex tech trees, slow pace) and applied them all to reduce the scope of the game.
People who compare BAR to FAF don’t seem to understand that. Your target audience isn’t former FAF players who like to coordinate epic multi-hour games, it’s players of fast-paced lobby RTSes.
Multiplayer FAF games are fast, like 20 minutes, sometimes much more, but usually not too long.
Are you talking about FAF single player? Where you can noodle around for hours and the AI exists for the sole purpose of giving the player something to shoot at?
There's a popular Starcraft 2 commentary-and-gameplay streamer, Winter, who spent some time posting commentated BAR games. Videos from this period include direct pleas to his audience to take more of an interest because it's a better game with a better development model.
Then he took BAR off of his main youtube channel because that didn't work. He now seems to operate a separate variety channel with some BAR content.
I think about what this says about the role that marketing plays in people-in-general's choice of pastimes.
I can't speak for everyone but at somepoint I find myself wanting to watch a sc2 game so I "turn on" wintersc's channel. Because I want starcraft. It doesn't really matter how good BAR is if I'm looking for sc2. I might want to watch BAR at some other moment, but that's a different behaviour mechanism, if you see what I mean.
The Total Annihilation fans are probably even more marketing resistant than Starcraft fans.
So, in your opinion, Beyond All Reason is getting more new players than Starcraft 2 is?
For what its worth, the Total Annihilation derived project with the most attention currently is is BAR https://www.beyondallreason.info/ They decided to make it legally distinct, but it was the balanced annihilation project which was total annihilation rebalanced for better pvp. I don't play too many RTS so this is not authoritative, but BAR plays better than any other rts I have tried, They really care about the fine details of user experience there.
In fact, I consider Chris Taylor(Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander) to be one of if not the greatest RTS designers. His games don't have the fluff people appear to love(looking at you starcraft) but he gets the control design better than anyone else I have seen.
[1] https://github.com/techannihilation/TA
That said, BAR was great fun when I tried it and very well done. Even has a rapidly growing youtube community.
Some of the elements in BAR is really awesome, radar, anti-radar, radar killing rockets, EMP on anti-nuke. The strategic depth and complexity is really at DOTA level.
It's by far the greatest RTS to play for the next 10+ years. And its free.
It has to be possible to use fixed point arithmetic?
But it's much easier and makes the game faster to just not bother, compile the windows version and let people play under Proton/Crossover :)
To whoever put it together, thank you.
What fluff (of Starcraft) are you referring to?
Like, no, cutscenes have nothing do with improving gameplay, but they don't detract from it either.
The game itself is the epitome of responding to a user's inputs precisely the way they would expect them to.
There's certainly some design decisions you can dislike, (some of which were basically technical limitations) like some of the hot keys and workers not rallying, but those are pretty minor compared to the sheer perfection that is the rest of the game.
You can prefer a different type of game, one where you give high level orders to units or start with an army instead of building it, but that's clearly a very different genre of game and not one that TA and its children are trying to be.
I have to admit my experience lies mostly in Brood War, and surely "the game responds intuitively to user inputs" is not one of the ways you'd describe it? That game is notoriously clunky in how it handles user input, both in terms of selection limitations, unit path finding, etc.
Don't get me wrong. I love Brood War. It's the only competitive video game scene I've really cared about. But I love it for its clunky user experience (which requires mechanical mastery in addition to a sound tactical mind), not because it's so smooth.
Your experience of the game is going to change dramatically depending on when you first played it and how much experience you have with the genre in general. For all my gushing adoration for the game, it is well over a quarter-century old at this point and even then it assumed a fair amount of knowledge and understanding about how the genre works.
When you say "close to beating it" I assume you're talking about the single player campaign, as opposed to the multiplayer death matches?
It's impossible for me to separate my current opinion from the decades of memories I have bound up in the game, but I think the campaign still holds up today, especially in the remastered version. It tells an interesting story with missions that are still fun to play, assuming you enjoy the basic rts build base make units attack enemy.
Like I said, it's hard to tell exactly what part of it you're having problems with, the fundamental gameplay loop is start with a small base, build workers, gather more resources, build bigger base, use bigger base to build army, use army to secure more resource areas to build even bigger base, use biggerer base to build biggest army, win map.
If you're having trouble actually beating the campaigns, 90% of the time the problem is people aren't building enough workers, the exact math gets a little complicated but as a very general rule of thumb you should probably have 25-26 workers for every set of minerals you have a base at, and you should be prioritizing building these workers above basically everything else.
Once you reach something like 8 workers mining minerals you can afford to both constantly build workers and build other units, then once you hit 26 or so you can stop building workers and focus on maxing out your army. Generally speaking the campaign AI is pretty forgiving, concentrating on defense for the first 10 minutes and then pushing out with a maxed out army works on like 90% of the maps.
Beyond that, I don't know what to say about clunky and slow. If the game is too slow, you can actually change what speed it plays at in the options menu, it actually defaults to a medium speed that nobody actually plays the game at, everyone plays at fastest setting, so dunno, maybe that's it. Other than that, units do exactly what you tell them to, no more, no less, that's the nature of this type of game, you're expected to be controlling essentially every unit on the map at all times.
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I think that's the core of a big criticism of Starcraft. After a certain point, it almost becomes a rhythm game.
The actual depth of the units was also smaller, compared to the fairly rich dynamics of TA.
This doesn't make it a worse game, but it is distinctly different.
I've never once touched the multiplayer mode. I don't recall seeing the option for it. I mean, I'm sure it's there, but I don't remember it, which means I've never clicked on it. So, yes, single player campaign only. A decent amount of the original, and then about half a level of Brood War when I skipped forward one time.
Wow, that sounds like a hella lotta workers. I vaguely recall trying that in a mission or two where I had severe resource problems, but then I didn't have enough offensive units and ran out of minerals by mining them too fast. Hmm... I remember getting frustration-curiosity a couple times and checking YouTube videos of how people beat missions I was completely stuck on, and being very unsatisfied because what I saw worked when I tried it myself but I didn't understand it (I can tell I didn't understand it because I don't remember it).
I didn't know there's a speed setting. That could make missions less of a long-ass slog, although, uh, controlling every unit at once? That sounds like a massive amount of busywork and I'm not confident I could pull it off (unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean). What I meant by "slow" is the missions can drag on for a reeeaaaally long time, and by "clunky and fiddly", I mean it was hard to make things happen because of all the... not sure how to describe it. I guess I'd want to change the speed lower, but then everything would take too long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And if by "the genre" you mean real-time strategy games, StarCraft is the only one I have any level of familiarity with, so if it assumes you already know that stuff, then that's probably a problem. When I said it's "a confusing sequence of disconnected events", I mean I couldn't correlate most of what I did to any of what happened. It was just random stuff happening most of the time, and when I changed my approach, I couldn't predict what the outcome would be and no significant learning occurred.
Despite all that, I really do like the game (wouldn't be talkin' about it so much if I didn't). I appreciate your advice, too. I'll have to see if I can get the thing running again.
If you dislike the micro required, thats fine, but just because it doesnt suite your preference doesn't mean its bad or clunky.
Just say “I dont like it”.
Thats fine.
If you want to “get” it, devote a few days to playing online multiplayer.
Also interesting, they went with a specific kind of maps with things like nearly identical mineral lines, no islands or isolated high/low ground, map symmetry, not to big, not to small, ramps, chokes etc and then they balance the game mechanics around those maps making those choices almost permanent.
I use to download a lot of replays and there is a lot more technical fun to be had that is pretty much irrelevant in apm battles. It is also funny to see the game fall apart on maps that don't follow the standard design. Like, flying buildings should be fun not useless or the end of the world.
As the gen Zs would say: Skill Issue.
Starcraft is EXQUISITELY optimized for e-gaming and streaming. That means short games and relatively small maps and relatively small numbers of units and "snowballing". Small advantages from a micro battle or macro organization multiply quickly into an inexorable avalanche. It's why Blizzard has to CONSTANTLY jiggle things to bump the meta around.
Supreme Commander, by contrast, tended toward larger maps. Your Tier 1 unit rarely could find the opponent before they were already laying out Tier 2 buildings. Battles had ebb and flow and RECLAIMING after a battle occurred meant that if you survived a battle, you now had material to rebuild and possibly more than the person who launched the attack. The game was more homeostatic than avalanche. But that doesn't tend to make good e-gaming or streaming fodder for ADHD teenagers.
And the interface differences are MASSIVE. I could go on for HOURS about why I LOATHE the Starcraft interface and love the Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance one (and similarly Beyond All Reason). But, that's a personal preference thing.
Starcraft came way before that was even a thing
SupCom is interesting to play and boring to watch. Tier 1 rushes are map specific to your point… but then Tier 1 units are irrelevant.
Risk would be similarly boring to watch. It’s not that it’s a bad game (quite the contrary).
Blizzard has to balance the meta as the meta is so extensively studied - because it has an audience.
Quake3 was released a year(ish) later and effectively had no single player and it was a major success (by the standards of the day)
Being online was a major, major factor.
By the time my crowd had reliable enough connections for multiplayer, the number of people who knew and liked Starcraft from that campaign was much higher than the number who'd either gotten to love TA from the campaign or from vs-computer matches.
in brood war you get info when units are made and sounds wben they die. unless an invisible dark templar one shots your units, then no sound
also brood war is the better game
I find TA campaign quite enjoyable, but, sadly, controls are quite lacking. If nanolathe adds BAR-style controls to TA that would be interesting
And this may be wrong, that is, I don't know how to confirm it, But I heard someone was working on a campaign, Which would be neat if true.
I quite like BAR but don't much enjoy PvP (I don't have the temperament or speed of thought for it, I like to pause and think too much). So I watch PvP games, and play AI skirmishes and scenarios.
People are working on BAR campaign, but it's like space war between different empires. I don't care for that kind of stuff, there's already too much content of this kind.
BAR scenarios are quite interesting, indeed...
With modern tooling, libraries and such, many of supcoms old technical issues can be addressed. (plus it now works on linux and mac!)
I think I'm close to a like for like version.
And of course the performance is leaps and bounds beyond what supcom could do, you can see a 64,000 unit air fight, and I'm pretty sure i can get that going at 60fps plus!
and end game vs the ai, is still 4x realtime, well beyond what supcom could do.
and of course higher player v player battles
You can see that all here and in the replies https://forum.faforever.com/topic/10451/supcom-moho-engine-r...
Using Lua files for AI does not seem like a great idea if you have control over the game source, though you can likely run run one lua thread per AI player.
I wonder how much your project is an attempt at a faithful reverse-engineered version vs an improved one, though given that you improved on networking, I would guess the latter? There are many features I would love to see added in, such as multi-monitor (multi-window & multi view) support. My concern is: as you diverge more and more by adding features, you risk making it harder to compare to the original for accuracy.
Anyway, as I failed to install FAF in my Flatpaked Steam install a few years ago [1], I would really appreciate a native Linux build for this (though I guess I could try the .exe under Steam/Proton).
I also played a bit of Supreme Commander on my Steam Deck, and while it was playable, I would appreciate better controller integration (at least Steam Input to simplify UI overlay creation).
All of that, and more, would be doable with a decompiled port.
[1] It would have been possible, I needed to shoehorn a java runtime in there, but it didn't sound fun anymore and only had a few hours to play with friends
Like these sites simply look good, and if they had been built before AI people would have loved them.
It makes me dislike whatever they're trying to "sell" (literally or metaphorically). I wish people who wanted to be "creative" would you know... be creative, not just "push button, machine go brrr" which is what half this stuff spits out. Template, generic, no individuality. Hyper "professional" looking (but just "cool" enough to not be completely corporate).
On the other hand some of these look better and are more responsive than older sites that were definitely fuglier, klunky and less responsive. It feels like there's a middle ground, which I think is where good designer comes into play.
And it really gives me the ick when I see websites about things like game modding projects and they're full of AI linkedin-speak. I feel like if you were excited about building a mod for a game you wouldn't need AI to describe it for you, or write the announcements/reddit posts trying to reach out to the community.
I have built a few better sites after AI generates the shell. The colors and styling need about a dozen human interactions to get something passable as human created.
Just safer that way. You don't want to get the AI on you.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/386070/Planetary_Annihila...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation
More than just a spiritual successor, imo.
Some of the (open source) games on that engine (https://beyondallreason.info/ and https://zero-k.info/) have similar feeling with the original TA, with quite different play styles. I do prefer Zero-K over Beyond All Reason, but I would recommend anyone interested in the genre to try both and decide for themselves.
The lead Dev's "Cold takes" blog series are dripping with the sort of insights you only get from years of hard won iteration and if you like RTS games are a joy to read : https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes
I wish the useful improvements would be ported to https://github.com/open-annihilation/open-annihilation which seems a better open source project.
I spent so much time in the game playing the story, then playing skirmishes, building massive bases. "Hacking" the game to increase the max-unit-count to numbers my computer could barely manage.
Then I discovered HEAT.NET and started playing in a competitive clan. Then... life happened, and I have a lot of nostalgia for it now, but not enough time.
After digging I found this - https://github.com/benbreen/RecoilEngine-AppleSilicon Looks like someone has ported and successfully gotten some or all of it working.
I think Beyond all Reason has had some 50v50s or close that are a bit ridiculous to watch.
I love the idea of having some reinforcement learning approach that keeps generating new AI versions that play each other indefinitely.
"Punchy phrase. No X." "An open engine. Room to make it your own. "Same scene. Same instant. The same explosion. A different atmosphere." "A few things to know. The short answers."
Why is it always the same? What awful post-training, or synthetic data training pipeline, or RLHF gone wrong, produced this homogenised, low variety slop style? And it's totally possible for LLMs to write actually decent or at least varied prose and I would think Anthropic (or OpenAI) has the resources to fix the issue, they just choose not to.
Marketing copy wasn't this homogenous prior to LLMs, unless my memory fails me.
It was, or at least the most popular sites used it. LLMs just amplified it.
It really gives me the ick when I see websites about things like game modding projects, things that are for-fun creative projects, and they're full of AI linkedin-speak. I feel like if you were excited about building a mod for a game you wouldn't need AI to describe it for you, or write the announcements/reddit posts trying to reach out to the community.
That _is_ the problem: ostensibly serious writing laced with marketing / clickbaity patterns is off-putting.
Like when you were a kid goofing around with some art supplies and you tried to mix every color of crayons, markers, watercolors, and/or colored pencils together to be both anything and everything all at the same time: It's just a sea of homogeneous brown yuck.
That homogenized yuck might work for code that is ultimately interpreted by a machine and that performs some kind of human-described function, but in writing (and in menu boards) it's just highly-emphatic sludge.
It's quintessential ai slop.
But that's fine, because nobody forced me to read it, so I'm unbothered.
Honestly, it's the last type of people that I want to touch creative products such as video games.
A) I was hit by a multiple _second_ load time (on a 1Gbps pipe btw)
B) The in game cursor was _visibly_ lagging
C) The gameplay itself was stuttery (and I am almost certain there is a hard one frame delay between most actions)
Then I thought, alright it could be Firefox, so I loaded it up in a fresh chromium image, and somehow it's worse. Then finally I looked at the source and it's very obvious why the performance is atrocious (the guy didn't really bother to tell his agent, "hey man, let's benchmark this and keep performance in check, maybe don't spam a billion draw calls everywhere y'know, maybe
Values below are medians across runs, including the median of each run's maximum tick time. Each pair reads *Go 1.25.0 → Go 1.27.1*; timings are ms.
| Mode | Process CPU/tick | Wall p50 | Wall p95 | Run maximum | Allocated bytes/tick |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| Modern | 1.877 → 1.812 | 1.744 → 1.665 | 2.765 → 2.705 | 8.934 → 8.740 | 86,428 → 86,428 |
| Strict 3.1 | 1.210 → 1.101 | 1.144 → 1.041 | 1.577 → 1.498 | 4.555 → 4.594 | 19,871 → 19,871 |
| Community 3.9 | 1.591 → 1.447 | 1.433 → 1.290 | 2.407 → 2.299 | 9.323 → 9.310 | 16,721 → 16,721 |
fix this y'know ")
With modern tooling, libraries and such, many of supcoms old technical issues can be address. (plus it now works on linux and mac!)
I think I'm close to a like for like version.
And of course the performance its leaps and bounds beyond what supcom could do, in the replies a few down, you can see a 64,000 unit air fight, and I'm pretty sure i can get that going at 60fps plus!
and end game vs the ai, is still 4x realtime, well beyond what supcom could do.
and of course higher player v player battles
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/10451/supcom-moho-engine-r...
https://www.moddb.com/mods/loud-ai-supreme-commander-forged-...
The first would be great, but probably very difficult technically. The second would probably cause a holy war in the community, as multiplayer RTS enjoyers glorify fighting against the genre's jank as an expression of skill (admittedly it would completely change all micro).
The original game got a lot of things right, I saw videos of Beyond All Reason and while I didn't play it it didn't quite _feel_ like it would give the same feedback while playing.
I was considering doing exactly that in my spare time, so thank you nanolathe I'll definitely check it out.
This is the theory, yes. Have you ever tried to actually do this? They are never written by engineers, and are much more focused on being as vague and broad as possible to be as useful a legal weapon as they can.
Patents are rarely even useful in reverse engineering, let alone enough on their own
The engine was more like a hybrid 2d/3d. Units were 3d, everything else brilliantly faked.
I mean, i played it on really weak machine (high end 486 or a cheap pentium), and it worked like charm, no gpu involved.
https://github.com/nanolathe-gg/nanolathe/blob/main/AGENTS.m...
Come on ChatGPT/Claude, you're smart enough to know the original wasn't an isometric perspective. It was directly top-down, no camera rotation. 3D over 2D terrain with a heightmap.
It refers to how the viewport is not like a camera above 3D terrain. Instead, you see each point below as though directly above. In other words, you can only ever see the top of an object regardless of whether it is centered or on the edge.
If it wasn’t isometric, you would see more of the sides of objects that are near the edges.
Are you possibly thinking of "orthographic"?
Isn't that what AI is?
But this is promising! I look forward to updates!!
Heh. I did my own game engine rewrite project recently, and once it reached parity I started thinking "ok so how can I make it look better?". I also added bloom, and on some level it did look kinda cool but ultimately I decided it was tacky. No offense to OP but I think the graphical "enhancements" here are also pretty tacky (but I totally understand the urge to add them!)
closes tab.
How is anyone meant to understand this Claude bullshit
I would be surprised if that stood up in court but I doubt anyone cares for TA at this point anyway.
Plus I think clean room process needs two separate teams and this is just one guy.
I did find this post from actual lawyers about it, but basically it's a grey area that hasn't been decided yet.
https://www.beankinney.com/news-and-insights/blogs/512000-li...
As with most forms of theft and laundering, it's not really that clever.
>> This document records behavior established from static analysis of the retail TotalA.exe. It is a clean-room behavioral contract, not a source translation. It deliberately omits executable addresses, data-image offsets, and raw decompiler names. The phrases established, supported inference, and unknown distinguish what the analysis proves from what remains a useful but unverified interpretation.
The evidence is the executable's own control and data flow, its PE import table, and its embedded string vocabulary. Nothing here is taken from another engine, a capture, or a reimplementation.
Step 1: Ask an LLM to decompile a binary, wash it into a "clean" description of the binary in its own format (a bunch of .MD files, one might suppose) and then build a new binary from that description.
Step 2: Nothing.
Is this really going to hold up in court?
I'm just curious, people consider this theft?
I hope it gets booted off Microsoft-owned Github for blatant copyright infringement. Total Annihilation ain't abandonware, and Xbox division don't need legal boycotts from third party publishers.
You’d have to redefine copyright as “claim to a latent space region”, which the techbros would love since theyd effectively get to sell that new land.
Narrative Startup right here
There's a sort of motto in technical writing: every page is page 1.
https://everypageispageone.com/
Don't assume your readers know anything at all. Work out your assumptions and always state them.
I was curious, but not enough to do more than a cursory search. Apparently it's some game I've never heard of and am not curious enough about to read an entire article on it to learn what it can't run on and why porting it was worth it.
State your axioms. That means, step 1, work out what your axioms are, and specify them.
"I didn't read the first page"
It states right there up front that it's a game and even shows a demo of it playing...